The other day I happened to be in the town where I was born and not far
from the commonplace house in the humbler quarter of the town where my
parents were living at the time of my birth, half a century and more
ago. I am not fond of my native town, although I lived in the place
until I was seventeen or eighteen years old. It was never a
distinguished spot and seems to have gained nothing as yet from having
been my birthplace. It has some reputation of its own, however, but that
is due to the enduring popularity of a certain cookstove that has long
been manufactured there, the "Stearns and Frost Cooker," known to many
housewives of several generations. In my youth the Stearns and Frost
stove works were reputed to be the largest in the world, and most of the
plain citizens of Alton were concerned in one way or another with them.
I do not happen to be interested in the manufacture or sale, or I may
add the use, of the domestic cookstove. As a boy I always thought the
town a dull, ugly sort of place, and although it has grown marvelously
these last thirty years, having been completely surrounded and absorbed
by the neighboring city of B----, it did not seem to me that day when I
revisited it to have grown perceptibly in grace....
Having a couple of spare hours before meeting a dinner engagement, I
descended into a subway and was shot out in less than ten minutes from
the heart of the city to the old "Square" of Alton,--a journey that took
us formerly from half to three quarters of an hour, and in cold or rainy
weather, of which there is a good deal in Alton, seemed truly
interminable. From the "Square," which no longer had the noble amplitude
of my memory, the direct way to Fuller Place lay up the South Road,--a
broad thoroughfare, through the center of which there used to trickle
occasionally a tiny horse-drawn vehicle to and from the great city of
B----. South Road, I found, had changed its name to the more pompous
designation of State Avenue, and it was noisy and busy enough to accord
with my childish imagination of it, but none too large for the mammoth
moving-vans in which the electric railroad now transported the
inhabitants. These shot by me in bewildering numbers. I had chosen to
make the rest of my journey on foot, trying leisurely to revive old
memories and sensations. For a few blocks I succeeded in picking out
here and there a familiar object, but by the time I reached the
cross-street where we used to descend from the street-cars and penetrate
the lane that led to Fuller Place I was completely at sea. The ample
wooden houses fronting the South Road, each surrounded by its green lawn
with appropriate shrubbery, had all given way before the march of brick
business blocks. Even the "Reformed Methodist" church on the corner of
Lamb Street had been replaced by a stone structure that discreetly
concealed its denominational quality from the passer-by. Beyond the
church there had been a half-mile of unoccupied land fronting on the
Road, but now the line of "permanent improvements" ran unbroken as far
as the eye could see. Into this maze of unfamiliar buildings I plunged
and wandered at random for half an hour through blocks of brick stores,
office buildings, factories, tenements,--chiefly tenements it seemed to
me. Off in one corner of the district instead of high tenement buildings
there was something almost worse, rows of mean, little two-story brick
cottages that ranged upwards along a gentle slope that I tried to fancy
was Swan's Hill,--a dangerous descent where my older brothers and I were
once allowed to coast on our "double-runner." I will not weary the
reader with further details of my wandering with its disappointment and
shattered illusions, which can in no way be of interest to any but the
one in search of his past, and of purely sentimental importance to him.
It is, of course, a common form of egotism to chronicle such small-beer
of one's origin, but it happens to have nothing to do with my purpose.
Enough to say that at last I discovered Fuller Place,--a mean, little
right-angled street that led nowhere; but from one end to the other I
could not find my old home. Its site must now be occupied by one of
those ugly five-story apartment boxes that spring like weeds in old
towns and cities. As I lingered in front of the brick wall that I judged
must very nearly cover the site of my birthplace, I tried to understand
the sensation of utter unfamiliarity with which the whole place filled
me. The answer came to me in a flash as I turned away from Fuller
Place,--Clark's Field no longer existed! Its place was completely filled
by the maze of brick and mortar in which for the better part of an hour
I had lost myself. There was nothing surprising that after a third of a
century a large, vacant field should have been carved up into streets,
alleys, and lots, and be covered with buildings to house the growing
population of a city. It is one of the usual commonplaces in our
American cities and towns. But to me the total disappearance of Clark's
Field seemed momentous. That large, open tract near my old home had more
significance, at least in memory, than the home itself. It was
intricately interwoven with all the imaginative and more personal life
that I had known as a boy. One corner of the irregular open land known
as Clark's Field had abutted my father's small property in Fuller Place,
and I and my older brothers and our friends had taken advantage of this
fact to open an unauthorized entrance into the Field through the board
fence in the rear yard. Over that fence lay freedom from parental
control and family tasks, and there was also, it happened, a certain bed
of luscious strawberries which we regularly looted until the market
gardener, who at the time leased this corner of Clark's Field, resigned
himself to the inevitable and substituted winter cabbages for the
strawberries,--a crop he had never been able to get to market.
From the gardener's beds and small forcing-houses the land stretched
away unbroken by cultivation or building to that Swan's Hill where we
coasted and farther to the suburban estates of several affluent
citizens,--I presume the homes of Stearns and Frost of stove fame and
others no longer remembered. These places, with their stately trees and
greenhouses and careful lawns, have also been merged into the domain of
brick and mortar and concrete. To the right of the market garden,
between us and the South Road, lay the level, treeless tract, about
fifty acres in extent, which was specifically known as Clark's Field,
although all the unused land in the neighborhood had originally belonged
to the Clark farm. The Field was carefully fenced in with high white
palings,--too high for a small boy to climb safely in a hurry. Certain
large signs, at the different corners, averred that the Field was for
sale and would be divided into suitable lots for building purposes, and
also that trespassers were so little desired that they would be
prosecuted by law. These signs were regularly defaced with stones and
snowballs according to season, and were as regularly reerected every
spring by the hopeful owner or his agent. For in spite of its difficult
paling and warning signs, Clark's Field remained our favorite ball-field
and recreation spot where in summer we dug caves and skated when the
autumn rains were obliging enough to come before the frost. I suppose
that we destroyed the signs as a point of honor, and preferred Clark's
Field to all the other open land free to us because we could see no
reason for the prohibition. At any rate, we "trespassed" upon it at all
hours of day and night, and many a time have I ripped my clothes on the
sharp points of those palings in my breathless haste to escape some real
or fancied pursuit by one in authority. We had not only the regular
police--the "cops"--to contend with, but we believed that old man Clark
employed private watchmen and even descended to the mean habit of
sneaking about the Field himself, peering through the close palings to
snare us. There must have been some fire in all this smoke of memory,
for I distinctly recall one occasion that resulted disastrously to me
and has left with me such a vivid picture that its origin must have been
real. I was one of the younger and less athletic of our gang and had
been nabbed by the fat policeman on our beat and led ignominiously
through the streets of Alton by the collar of my coat,--not to the
police station in the "Square," nor to my father's house where my older
brothers had often been brought in similar disgrace. This time the
policeman, with the ingenuity of a Persian cadi, took me through the
public streets direct to headquarters,--the home of Mr. Samuel Clark. It
was, I believe, the only occasion on which I ever met the owner of
Clark's Field, certainly the only time I ever had speech with him; not
that there was much speech from me then. As I was reluctantly urged up
the long graveled drive of the respectable wooden house near the Square,
I saw an old, white-haired man getting into his family carriage with
some difficulty. The large, heavy person of the owner of Clark's Field
seemed to me a very formidable object when he turned upon me a pair of
dark, scowling eyes beneath bushy white brows and muttered something
about "bad boys." Those eyes and a curious trembling of the heavy
limbs--due to palsy, I suppose--are the only things I recollect of
Samuel Clark. Nor do I remember what he said to me beyond calling me a
bad boy or what judgment he meted out. All I know is that I returned
home without visiting the "lockup" behind the Square and became the
subject of a protracted and animated family discussion. My mother,
unexpectedly, took my part, inveighing against the "ogre" of a Clark who
deprived "nice" boys of the enjoyment of his useless field, and urged my
father, who had some acquaintance with fact as well as with law, to "do
something about Clark's Field." My father, I think, was at last
persuaded to visit the owner of the field to see what lawful
arrangements could be made so that well-behaved boys might freely and
honorably use the Field for their pleasure, until it should be disposed
of to builders. (Which, of course, would have taken from it every shred
of charm!) Whether in fact he made some such arrangement I cannot
remember, nor whether having been once caught I was sufficiently
intimidated by my visit to old Clark. All I know is that as long as we
remained in Alton, the Field continued its useless, forlorn, unoccupied
existence, jealously surrounded by a dilapidated though constantly
patched fence, with its numerous signs inviting prospective purchasers
to consult with the "owner"--signs that were regularly destroyed by
succeeding generations of boys. Already in my youth the busy town was
growing far beyond Clark's Field, along the South Road towards the new
railroad station; but the Field remained in dreary isolation from all
this new life until long after I had left the town.
As I have said, this empty field of fifty acres was the most permanent
experience of my youth. Its large, level surface, so persistently
offered to unwilling purchasers of real estate, seized hold of my boyish
imagination. I invented mysterious reasons for its condition, which as
time went on must have been influenced by what I heard at the family
table of the Clarks and their possessions. Now it is all inextricably
woven in my memory into a web of fact and fancy. The Field stood for me
during those fertile years as the physical symbol of the unknown, the
mysterious,--the source of adventure and legend,--long, long after I had
outgrown childish imaginings and had become fully involved in what we
like to call the serious matters of life. To-day I had but to close my
eyes and think of Fuller Place and my boyhood there to see that lonely
field, jealously hedged about by its fence of tall white palings,--see
it in all its former emptiness and mystery.
Of Clark's Field and the Clarks I mused as I retraced my way through the
maze of living that had been planted upon the old open land. All this
close-packed brick and mortar, these dull streets and high business
buildings, had been crowded man-fashion into the free, wind-swept field
of my fancy. Five thousand people at least must now be living and
largely have their being on our old playground,--a small town in itself.
And the change had come about in the last fifteen years or less. How had
it been brought to pass? Why after all the years of idleness that it had
endured had a use for Clark's Field been found? Something must have
broken that spell which had effectually restrained prospective
purchasers of real estate through all the years when the city was
pressing on beyond this point far away into the country.... The facts
are not all dime-novelish, but very human and significant, and by chance
the main thread of the real story of Clark's Field came to my knowledge
shortly after my visit, correcting and enlarging the impressions I had
formed from family gossip, the talk of playmates, and my own
imagination. And this story--the story of Clark's Field--I deem well
worth setting forth....
That same evening, when I entered the city hotel where I was to dine, I
found my friend walking impatiently up and down the lobby, for in my
search for the past I had forgotten my engagement and was late. Scarcely
greeting my guest, I burst out,--
"Edsall, do you remember Clark's Field?" (For Edsall had once lived in
Alton, though not in my part of the town.)
"Yes," he replied, somewhat surprised by my breathless eagerness. "What
about it?"
"I want to know what happened to it and why?"
Edsall, being a lawyer with a special interest in real estate, could
tell me many of the known facts about the Clark property over which
there had been some curious litigation. So the story grew that evening
over our dinner, to be filled in later by many details that came to me
unexpectedly,--I suppose because I was interested in the fate of Clark's
Field.
I
The Clarks, as their name implies, were of common English blood,
originally of some clerkly tribe and so possessing no distinctive
patronymic. These Clarks were ordinary Yankee farmers, who had been
settled in one place for upwards of two hundred years. Very likely some
ancestor of my old Samuel Clark had stood at Concord with "the embattled
farmers." I know not. He easily could have done so, for Alton was not
many miles distant from the battle field. But little either spiritual or
militant fervor from these Puritan ancestors seems to have come down to
Samuel, who in 1860 occupied the family farm of one hundred and forty
acres, "more or less," according to the loose description of old deeds.
Samuel, indeed, had not enough patriotism to sympathize with his son,
John Parsons, who finally ran off to the war, as so many boys did, to
escape the monotony of farm life. For Samuel, his father, was a plain,
ordinary, selfish, and not very thrifty New England farmer, who laid
down his fields every year to the same crops of oats and rye and hay,
kept a few sheep and hogs and cows, and in the easy, shiftless way of
his kind drained the soil of his old farm, with the narrow consolation
that it would somehow last his time.
So little ambition he had that shortly after his son went to the war,
thus depriving him of free labor, he "retired" from his farm,--that is,
he sold what he could of its fields and pastures and bought himself a
house on Church Street near the Square in Alton, probably the same house
where I was taken for my one interview with him. What he did not sell of
the farm he rented to another more energetic farmer, one Everitt Adams,
the old market-gardener whom I remembered. Adams with more thrift and
the great incentive of necessity built hothouses and went in for
market-gardening to supply the wants of the neighboring city, which was
already making itself felt upon the surrounding country. Hence the long
rows of celery, cabbage, lettuce, and peas that I remember across my
father's back fence. All the near-by farmers were doing much the same
thing, turning the better part of their land into gardens. They would
start before dawn in summer time for the city, making their way along
the South Road, which was the main thoroughfare into this part of the
country. Many a time have I seen their covered wagons returning from the
city about the time when I was starting for school, the horses wearily
plodding along at a walk, the farmer or his boy asleep in the wagon on
his empty crates.
I don't know what sort of an arrangement old Clark made with his tenant,
but Adams, who was a hard-working fellow with a tribe of strong
children, must have found the business profitable, especially after he
built the forcing-houses and began to supply unseasonable luxuries to
the prosperous citizens of B----. Prices ran high in the years of the
great war, and those farmers who stayed at home and cultivated their
gardens industriously made money at every turn. At any rate, it was
common knowledge in the neighborhood of Fuller Place that Everitt Adams
wished to purchase Clark's Field from its owner--the last piece of the
old farm that he had not hitherto disposed of--and had the money to pay
for it in the River Savings Bank. Indeed, gossip said that the price was
agreed upon,--five thousand dollars,--which was considered a fair price
in those days for fifty acres, six or seven miles from the city. And
Samuel Clark, so tradition also says, was anxious to sell his last field
for that price. His son had returned from the war wounded and incapable
of work, and his father wanted to set him up in a small shop in the
Square. The son, in spite of his invalidism, married shortly after his
return from the ranks and this made the need of ready money in the
Church Street house all the more urgent.
Trouble came when the lawyer employed by the market-gardener discovered
what old Clark must have known all the time, and that is that the Field
had a cloud upon its title, or rather an absolute restriction which
would render worthless any title that Samuel might give alone. To
explain this legal obstacle we must go back before the war and my day
into the previous generation. There had been a family quarrel between
Samuel and his older brother, which had resulted finally in Edward
Stanley--the elder son--going off to seek his fortunes in the new West,
which was attracting young men from the East at that time. This was in
1840 or thereabouts when Edward S. left his father's home in Alton, and
nothing more had been heard of him except the vague report from some
other exile from Alton that he had been seen in Chicago where he had
become a carpenter, and it was said had married. Probably Samuel, who
was then a young man and recently married with two little children, had
no great desire to have his elder brother's existence recalled to his
father. Everything I have learned about Samuel confirms the impression
of him I had as a boy, that he was not the kind of man whose conscience
would be sensitive in such matters. He probably considered that his
brother Ed, having taken his fate in his hands, should expect nothing
from the more timid members of the family who had stuck by the old farm.
But when the elder Clark died, a will was found in which to Samuel's
disgust an undivided half interest in the Field--the best part of the
farm--was left to his eldest son and his heirs.
There is no evidence that Samuel, at the time of his father's death,
ever took any measures, even of the most casual sort, to hunt up this
elder brother or find out if he had left any children. He made some sort
of deal with a younger brother who could not be ignored and continued to
work the old farm, living in his father's house on Swan's Hill. Probably
a long term of undisturbed possession of the farm convinced him that he
was the sole legitimate owner of the property, that the land was
absolutely and wholly his to do with what he would. And so, as we have
seen, in his old age he tried to dispose of the Field to the
market-gardener for five thousand dollars. But the lawyer raised the
obvious objection that the Field could not be sold without Edward's
consent, and of Edward nothing whatsoever was known. Some attempt was
made at this time by John Clark on behalf of his father to trace the
missing Edward--a feeble attempt. He wrote to an army friend in Chicago,
who found evidence that Edward S. Clark, a carpenter, had lived in the
city for five or six years and had moved thence to St. Louis. No trace
of him could be found in St. Louis, where John also wrote to the
postmaster. At that time, it should be remembered, St. Louis was the
port of departure for the little-known West, and possibly Edward and his
family had taken boat up the Missouri and gone on to the distant gold
fields or had merely drifted out into the neighboring prairie country
and stuck in some nook. It was all speculation. Nothing further of
Edward Stanley Clark was ever known by either Samuel or his son John. He
never announced himself to his Eastern relatives.
But Samuel could not sell the Field. Old Adams was altogether too shrewd
to spend five thousand dollars upon a property that had such an
uncertainty about its title, and in those days the lawyers whose advice
they were able to get could not suggest a satisfactory way of evading
the difficulty. No such thing as a title guaranty company had ever been
heard of in the old Commonwealth of M----. There was nothing to do but
wait in the hope that either information about Edward S. would be
forthcoming some day or that in time the law could be invoked to gloss
over the title. But Samuel, in hope of inducing some gullible purchaser
to run the risk, had the Field carefully fenced and put signs upon it.
For he needed the money, and needed it more as the years went by and
John's invalidism turned into chronic laziness and incapacity for
earning a livelihood. Everitt Adams moved away after a time and his
successors who leased the Field were never satisfactory. There were
taxes and assessments to be met, which grew all the time with the rising
value of adjacent land, as well as lawyer's fees. The income from the
small part of the Field now under cultivation was hardly adequate to
meet these, and after a time this income ceased altogether and the Field
became an absolute burden. For nobody seemed willing either to rent or
buy the property.
Of course, the son John, if he had had the energy, might have followed
old Adams's example and worked the Field for a time, until the gas and
sewer mains had corrupted the soil and spoiled it for market gardening.
But he preferred to rely upon his record as an old soldier and secured a
small clerkship in the Alton Gas Company, and some years later obtained
a pension. Of course, all this trouble with the Field supplied both him
and his father with ample cause for grumbling. Samuel had never liked
his brother Edward, who seemed almost spitefully to be turning this
trick against him in his old age, and he handed on his grievance to John
and his wife. The small, wooden house in Church Street contained a
narrow, ungracious family life, it can be seen, of petty economies and
few interests. No wonder that the Field--the one important family
possession remaining--became the favorite topic of discussion and
speculation. The city was growing fast, and Alton was already its most
considerable suburb. The lines of modern life had crept up to within
call of the old Field before the death of Samuel. So the old fellow was
not indulging in much exaggeration when he bragged towards the end that
he wouldn't take twenty-five thousand dollars for his property, although
ten years earlier he had been eager to sell for five thousand dollars!
That twenty-five thousand dollars, however, was as far away as the five
thousand, and the life in the Church Street house was more penurious and
uncomfortable than it had ever been on the old farm, which had provided
a coarse plenty for many generations. The Clarks were obviously running
out, and when the old man died in 1882 he must have had the bitter
consciousness that the family destiny had dwindled in his hands. From
being prosperous and respected farmers, living on their own land in
their ancestral square wooden house with its one enormous chimney, they
were living in real poverty in a small house on a dusty side street off
the noisy Square, which was not what it had once been as a place of
residence. And they did not even own this Church Street house--merely
clung to it from inertia and bad habit. The only thing they did own was
Clark's Field, and Mrs. John sometimes thought it would be better if
that had gone the way of the rest of the Clark farm, so insidious was
its moral influence upon the men as well as costly in the way of
outgo....
If a man's accomplishment in this life is to be reckoned by the
substantial gains he has made on his father's estate and condition, old
Samuel Clark had nothing to be proud of when he was borne to his grave
in the new cemetery a mile south of Clark's Field. He had left nothing
to his children but the Field, encumbered with the undivided and
indivisible half interest belonging to his brother Edward Stanley, were
he alive at this date, and to his heirs if he had any.